U.S. women's swim team on body image, eating disorders and supporting each other

Nicole Auerbach | USA TODAY Sports

As a young girl, Misty Hyman thought athleticism equated to attractiveness. She believed being strong was beautiful.

Hyman, who would grow up to become an Olympic gold medalist swimmer, didn’t realize her personal beliefs about beauty didn’t align with society’s until her teenage years — and then the realization hit hard.

“I started to have a sense of what I looked like to other people, and that became an important part,” Hyman said. “It was confusing to determine what’s best for my body in terms of my performance and, ‘Hey, I like getting this attention.’”

Hyman started to watch what she ate, first as a way to enhance her swimming. She looked leaner, thinner — and then better to those around her.

“Competitive swimming can be really extreme — you’re training a lot,” Hyman said. “You do have to have a lot of calories. You do end up with shoulders that are bigger than the average woman, sometimes bigger than your guy friends.

“Now I see that as something that’s beautiful and strong, and I celebrate that. When I was a teen it was very hard to separate those ideas of what femininity is, what beauty is and what my identity was in relation to that as an athlete.”

Hyman’s relationship with her body highlights a complex reality for elite female swimmers. They are athletes who push their bodies to the brink in a sport that rewards sleek and strong. But at the same time it can also be difficult for women who go through normal, natural life processes: puberty, erratic eating schedules in college and perhaps that extra scoop of ice cream, wedding dress shopping, pregnancy.

All those experiences can affect a woman’s body image, particularly in this Photoshop-driven culture that idealizes a specific female figure — one that’s slim in all the right places and curvy in a select few spots.

Female swimmers navigate this world from childhood, sometimes resulting in tears and, at its extremes, eating disorders. And they’re navigating this complex world in bathing suits.

“You’re basically half-naked your whole life,” said four-time Olympic gold medalist Dana Vollmer, who qualified for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics 15 months after delivering her first child. “It’s something that I think has to be approached very carefully by coaches and by parents.”

Said five-time Olympic medalist Missy Franklin: “There’s so much that’s coming at you from so many different angles. You’re impressed upon really, really easily. When I was 13, I had size 13 feet. I was very different, and it made me stand out. It makes you feel a little uncomfortable when you’re so different from your peers — and from what you’re seeing.”

Desire for control

For nearly a decade, starting in her senior year in high school, Hyman had an eating disorder; she is choosing to speak to USA TODAY Sports to tell her story publicly for the first time. She was bulimic.

“Binging and purging was my, I guess, outlet,” said Hyman, 37. “Part of it was my own insecurities; part of it was my own control, the sense of being in control or something I could control. It wasn’t strictly just a body image issue or strictly just, ‘I’m trying to perform better.’ As an athlete I think there were other emotional challenges that I manifested into my eating disorder as a way of coping. It wasn’t something that I was necessarily secretive about. My coaches were aware, my parents were aware, and I wasn’t shy about it. One of the things I’d always prided myself on was discipline.

“I thought that was a big part of my identity, and when my eating issues got out of control I felt like I was not myself anymore, like, ‘I normally can control this.’”

Olympian Maya DiRado, who will compete in the 200- and 400-meter individual medleys and the 200 backstroke in Rio, says she has known multiple swimmers who have had eating disorders during their careers.

“I’m sure a lot of it has to do with being in a swimsuit every day, but I think also it seemed like they wanted control,” DiRado said. “It was this one tiny piece that, even if you weren’t swimming well, you could control what you were eating and how you were looking. That’s really hard, but all of the girls that had issues, it took a long time, but they’re back and they’re a lot better. But it was a long road.

Jennifer Carter, Ohio State University Sports Medicine Center’s director of sport psychology, agrees there are specific risk factors for eating disorders in female athletes, such as a belief that thinness equates to better performance (whereas in male athletes more muscularity equates to better performance), revealing uniforms and, sometimes, a type of perfectionist personality.

“We know that there may be different factors affecting male versus female athletes,” Carter said. “In terms of the body type that athletes are going for, we know in our culture that thinness for women and muscularity for men is the cultural ideal of beauty right now.”

For male swimmers, society’s ideal body type mirrors that of an athlete in peak physical condition — those long torsos, broad shoulders, chiseled abs. Someone such as Ryan Lochte becomes not only an elite swimmer but also a sex symbol.

Both male and female athletes might have what a 2011 sports psychology study by A. P. Karin de Bruin and others term “contextual” body images — meaning two different body images, one for sport and one for their lives outside sport.

A simple example: A female swimmer might feel good about her broad shoulders in the pool but negative about them when she cannot find shirts that fit properly at a shopping mall.

“We know that the negative body image in either context can be a risk factor for eating disorders,” Carter said.

Hyman’s eating disorder sometimes interfered with her schoolwork and swim practice, but she said it never reached a life-threatening point.

She knew it was something she couldn’t live with once her swimming career ended, though; she just wasn’t sure how to eliminate those habits.

Hyman, who won a stunning gold medal in 2000 with an Olympic- and American-record 200 fly time, retired from swimming in 2004. She spent the next three years living on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a decision she didn’t realize at the time would help her heal.

While working at a resort, she learned to understand her identity beyond swimming.

“I had confused those in a lot of ways — my identity and my swimming performance,” Hyman said. “What I discovered when I gave myself permission was to eat what I wanted and not worry about my weight and not worry about my physical performance. I did gain weight at first — and then I realized that people still liked me, that I could still perform on the job, that I was still a productive human being, that I could still have a lot of fun, that I could still have this really rich and fulfilling life.”

Like most new moms, Vollmer wanted to get back in shape after giving birth to her son, Arlen, last March. She sought control over her body again, a feeling she hadn’t had in more than nine months.

As she began her journey toward Rio — and she admits even now she couldn’t have imagined she’d get so fast and so strong in just 15 months — she did it with 50 extra pounds on her 6-1 frame.

Which wasn’t easy.

“Having to stand the pool deck — part of me didn’t want to go because of that,” Vollmer said. “I’d left the college team being in shape, and now I was going back. I never really had boobs before, and now I’m a nursing mom plus the baby weight. For me to still put on a swimsuit and to go out there …

“I realized that the other girls couldn’t care less. That the (pressure) was all coming from me.”

The idea of internalizing prevailing ideals is not new; it’s something female athletes struggle with more than male athletes, according to the de Bruin et al study. Vollmer thinks her son actually helped her snap out of a potentially unhealthy mind-set.

“If I’d come back to swimming without having a baby and maybe I’d gain that weight just from my time off, maybe it would’ve been more restriction-based or, like, ‘Get that body back,’ just that kind of pressure,” she said. “It was more about having enough calories to still nurse Arlen, too. We had a mom group, and I really liked this: Someone told me, ‘Your child is not going to remember lying on your bony collarbone and biceps. They want to be snuggled and protected.’ And that was kind of her way of saying don’t become overly obsessive losing the baby weight.

“For me, it was a really healthy way to come back to the sport.”

By not obsessing, Vollmer, 28, lost her baby weight faster than she expected. She continued to train, alongside longtime coach Teri McKeever, from what she terms a raw starting point back to the world-class swimmer she was before — and is today. At the U.S. trials in June, Vollmer qualified for the Olympic team in the 100 fly and also as a member of the women’s 4x100 free relay.

Now Vollmer has a chance to make history: She could be the first American swimmer to win Olympic gold after giving birth.

It’s an unspoken agreement between brides-to-be: As wonderful as it feels to find the perfect one, wedding dress shopping can be unbelievably stressful. No one knows that better than former Stanford swimmer DiRado, who married her husband, Rob Andrews, last September.

“Everybody talks like, ‘Oh, swimmers’ bodies are so great!’” DiRado said. “I’m like, ‘Yes, but these are such a pain in the butt.’ They’re so big and just defy other peoples’ (ideals),” she added in reference to her shoulders.

“Shopping for my wedding dress, I was a (size) 8 and also a 4. You just have to buy a big dress and then get it tailored, because your shoulders are totally out of proportion to the rest of your body.”

DiRado described a team of women at Stanford who joked about their big shoulders, strong thigh muscles and shopping struggles — together. Franklin, who spent two years at California between the London and Rio Olympics, said her college experience was similar.

“It’s something that we make fun of now,” Franklin said. “We all joke about how we eat 5,000 calories a day. We joke about how we can’t fit into anything with our shoulders and how we’re breaking through the seams of shirts.

“Everyone knows what it’s like, and everyone’s also at that point now where we all understand that our bodies are our greatest gift and our greatest asset in the sport that we do every day. We’re all just going to own it.”

That perspective is something that has come with maturity and the ability to surround herself with others who’ve been through the same experiences. But it hasn’t always been the case. A few years ago, Franklin struggled with the dress code at her all-girls private Catholic high school.

“Everything had to be an inch above the knee,” Franklin said. “Trying to find things that go an inch above my knee — everything on me is a mini-skirt because my legs are so long. If teachers would be like, ‘Missy, it needs to be longer,’ I would be so frustrated, like, you guys don’t understand. I talked to my mom about these things, and she reiterated, ‘Missy, you wouldn’t be able to do this without your body. Love it, appreciate it; you’re exactly the way you’re supposed to be.’”